Stories and Secrets
by hairsprayheart
Summary: Pushing Daisies. Spring cleaning means bringing up more than dust. Memories will be made, secrets will be told, and pie will be eaten. Rated T, just to be safe.


Stories and Secrets

A Pushing Daisies Fic

**AN: Hi! I wrote this a VERY long time ago so I'm not quite sure how much sense it makes, and it's set after the first season. I have a few other plot bunnies bouncing around which means that it may be expanded. Please don't hesitate to ask questions or give me constructive criticism. Thanks for reading!**

It was finally spring, and Charlotte "Chuck" Charles was cleaning. Normally she didn't like to clean, but it was spring, and she was in the mood. She now had something to clean, now that she had she had her own house, along with all of her old stuff. Feather-duster in hand, she twirled around the room in a bright yellow dress, the very picture of a perfect housewife. Upon finishing, she returned the feather duster to its place in her cleaning basket and sighed happily. "Fresh as a daisy." She toured the little apartment to inspect her handiwork.

She looked over the little couch, her bedroom, the quaint kitchen, and found herself at a bookshelf. Chuck's fingers skimmed over the collection of books, lingering over the thin red spine of a worn paperback. Golden script graced the cover her eyes landed on when she finally pulled it from the shelf. The title was accompanied by a matching picture. Intrigued, she settled into her father's old easy chair and opened the book. She vaguely remembered the book, having last read it approximately 2 years, 5 months, 8 weeks, 11 hours, and 3 minutes before she was killed. Approximately.

As she read, her flesh began to tingle slightly, and she wondered suddenly if Ned had looked at any of these books when he had (so wonderfully and loveably) brought them here for her. The thought of this brought a flush to her cheeks. It was funny, and yet somehow not funny at all, how when she used to read these, she had thought of _him_ and dreamed of him, and known it would not happen; and now the very same feelings thoughts and dreams and knowings were entering her head, but the knowings were for altogether different reasons. Her eyes were beginning to refocus on the pages when she felt warmth on the back of her neck.

"Aaah!" Startled, she snapped the book shut, almost on the Pie Maker's nose.

"You startled me," she said, her mouth moving more slowly than her hands had in closing the book as she stated the obvious. "You… shouldn't… _do_ that," she said haltingly. Her breathing slowly went back to normal.

Ned looked at her, thankfully, Chuck noticed, not glancing at the book.

"You could've gotten me killed. Aren't you normally more careful about surprising me?"

Now feeling guilty, Ned observed, "Aren't you normally more enamored with surprises?" He paused. He half-expected her to grin. But she didn't. "I'm sorry. You're just so cute when you're concentrating."

Chuck actually was very cute when she was concentrating.

"Is something bothering you?"

"No," she insisted, discreetly inserting the paperback into the hole between the old cushion of the easy chair and its arm.

As he had been standing behind the chair, Ned did not notice the book as he backed up in order to avoid further confrontation, and, more importantly, the possibility of touching Chuck and thus death. He did not like confrontation. Or death.

And yet somehow, he always ended up dealing with both. His life just seemed one big joke, and if he hadn't been Ned – but he was _he_ – he assumed it would have been very funny indeed.

"Something is bothering you," he said finally.

Chuck got out of the chair and stood, walking up to him. "How did you get all of my stuff in here, anyway?"

"Well, I basically managed to convince your aunts that it wasn't doing them any good, anyway. Just all of it lying around, making them sad, and all that. I just grabbed all the things in the boxes that said 'Charlotte', went through them, and here they are." He looked sheepish, suddenly: "Do you mind that I went through your things?"

Perhaps he knew her too well.

"It was very sweet of you." This was true. "I don't mind at all." This was not.

"Okay."

Ned smiled his goofy half smile that she loved so much, and the fact that he had believed her so easily also made him loveable. She could have hugged him. (Well, not really.) She didn't know why it would bother her so much if he knew about her collection of erotica – normally they told each other everything – but somehow this seemed different. They never really talked much about the years they had spent apart, and that part of her life was now over; and given some parts of it, in particular, she was glad of this.

"Ned?" She was going to ask him why he had come to see her – she didn't really care; they practically lived with each other, were next-door neighbors again, even, though it was different since she had moved out – but what came out of her mouth was this: "When you told me you'd had 'relations' with somebody, what did that mean?" Before she could stop herself, she added, "_Relations _relations?"

True to form, the Pie Maker blushed. It appeared he hadn't been expecting the question, either. "Didn't we already talk about this?"

"The bearskin rug. Right," Chuck said. For a moment she didn't say anything, and Ned looked relieved. "Who was the somebody?"

"The somebody was nobody," Ned replied briskly, desperately wishing to drop the subject. "And I really would like not to talk about any other somebodies, because you are my only body, and I would like it to stay that way."

At this, Chuck giggled, for he had just unwittingly established her body as belonging to his (she decided she kind of liked this, even if it didn't make sense) and made a joke about her prior state of being dead. In response to his lack of response, she began one of her famous "what if…" statements, which usually resulted in a conversation that was both long and irrelevant to the previous conversation, and a comment about Chuck's wild imagination. In truth, Chuck's imagination was a combined effect of the creativity one attains by living with two eccentric aunts, the morbidity that may ensue after one has died, and the book collection itself. The things that the books made her imagine about the Pie Maker are not to be repeated and sadly not to ever come true, which is why they are classified as imagination.

"What if—" (here she paused, still struggling to contain her peals of laughter) "the bear could talk, and he asked your girlfriend to dance…" (Here, losing the struggle, she had to stop and laugh some more. It seemed that the more excited she was about something, the more absurd her ideas became, and the more she laughed. But she wasn't excited in a good way this time.)

"She wasn't my girlfriend," Ned mumbled. She could see his face had darkened as he turned away. "I have to go, Chuck, and make some… something."

Between the sick expression and the bad excuse, Chuck could tell something was wrong.

"Oh, Ned, don't be like that." But her front door had already closed.

Chuck sank back into her chair. Why didn't he want to talk about it? She retrieved her book, which had once been her aunts', and cursed the Fickle Finger of Fate for taking her aunts away from her. Or rather, her away from them. She wanted to talk to them about Ned. To tell them how much he confused her; how much she loved him and wanted to touch him, to touch anyone. She wished she could run to them and let them envelope her in their arms, where she had once filled a hole. Now there was a hole about her size in each of them, and a large one to fit both of her aunts in her, and she had to turn to the little she had left of them in memories, and naughty books she was embarrassed to let anyone know she read. Still she felt so very empty, and when she wanted to feel full, she decided to eat a pie.

**.**

Ned balanced uneasily on the edge of his bed. For some reason, his little home didn't feel quite like a home anymore. For the long time that it had been empty, it hadn't felt empty, but now that there was something he had lost, it did. That loss felt to him somewhat like eating a hot blueberry inside a pie you had already thought cold: it was surprising, extremely painful, and for a long time the only thing you could taste was blueberry. Right now, all he could taste was Chuck. (At least, he was thinking about her; actually tasting her would be her death.) And he was in pain, and the amount of pain he was enduring was rather surprising, given that only months ago he hadn't ever expected to see her again.

It was hard to say why they still fit so well into each other's lives. Both of them had already suffered such agonizing losses, that it was hard to form new attachments. So they each held on tightly to their pasts, one a boy at a boarding school with no friends, and the other a girl whose only friends were bees, not expecting it to have any bearing on their future. But luckily, it did.

He thought about Chuck. She had spent her whole life sheltered from the rest of the world, experiencing it through books. She had lived with bees, various assorted cheeses, and two very strange but somehow endearing aunts.

Then he thought about himself. He had spent his whole life at a boarding school, also somewhat sheltered, though goodness knows some of the things he experienced there were exactly what he was supposed to be protected from. Instead of honey and sweetness, most of his childhood was spent surrounded by dirt and dirty mouths.

And then he thought about her.

_The facts were these:_

_One Antoinette Athaneum, aged nineteen years, ten months, and forty-eight days, was very, very bored. So bored, in fact, that she had just fallen asleep on top of a recently returned library book. Antoinette was just your average library assistant, complete with mousy brown hair and rather ugly glasses, and was spectacular in absolutely no way whatsoever. She lacked the self-confidence or will to go to college, but had grown tired of her parents and had somehow ended up working at the Coeur d'Cour Local Library. At this exact moment in time, while she dreamed of contact lenses, someone else was about to come into contact with her._

_Young Ned, aged eighteen years, twenty-two weeks, and six days was attempting to check out a book about how to make a perfect pie crust, fittingly titled "How to Make a Perfect Pie Crust," when he realized that the girl he was approaching was quite still. Fearing her dead, he decided not to touch her, but when he leaned over to put the book on the counter he brushed her accidentally. This did not result in her suddenly coming back to life; only uttering an unladylike snore. She was simply asleep._

_He considered just taking the book but decided against it at his conscience's urging, and he did not realize when he was leaving the library that the girl was watching him leave, having recently woken with a crease in her cheek from the edge of the book she had fallen asleep upon._

_When she saw him (well, his retreating form), she decided that she wanted him. He was the only handsome boy she had ever seen in the library. She vowed that all she had learned from her secret stash of books deep in the back of the library would soon come in handy._

_The next day when he returned to the library and checked out the book, she said nothing, but when he came back five days and two hours later she told him "thank you" and offered a selection of cookbooks to him, which he turned down. Later, he came back and decided he did want one cookbook, and she smiled at him. Soon he was finding more and more reason to stop by the library, and one late night, as he studied for a test at the Longburrow School for Boys, she asked him if there was anything she could help him with and he said yes._

_Antoinette was not a pretty girl. She was not particularly bright. She was not witty, or charming, or clever. But she had brown hair and looked remarkably like the girl that Ned had been unable to stop thinking of for ten years._

_And this was how the pair came to be sitting across from each other on the floor of a library, long after it was supposed to be closed. Ned was more hesitant and nervous than he would let on, but Antoinette seemed surprisingly comfortable with this sort of thing, despite the stains that were blooming on her white blouse. The girl coyly asked the boy to close his eyes, and he did so. He pictured a different girl, one with a laugh that reminded him of home, one that was not afraid of playing with him, one that had soft lips. One he had not seen for ten years, but had thought of every waking moment. When he opened his eyes, quite a different girl was there, one who was now rather naked and trying to look seductive as she sprawled ungracefully over a thick brown shag rug. He was suddenly grateful that the library was dark._

_"Come closer, handsome," she said huskily, in her best imitation of a purr. Ned grimaced but obeyed, crawling over on hands and knees to the rug. He half-heartedly caressed her shoulders, careful to avoid other areas, and pretending that she was someone else. Antoinette grabbed him and pulled him on top of her, and when she rolled over, giggling, Ned felt something went dreadfully wrong. (And not just practically suffocating from her weight.)_

_Before he realized that the rug had once been alive, it was alive once again, and he recoiled in horror too quickly to touch it twice. The bear stood up to its full height. Antoinette began to scream shrilly, not in a nice way, leaving her clothes in a pile where the rug had once been, and hurled herself through the library's emergency exit. The bear let out a frightening roar and turned to follow. Taking advantage of the turned back, Ned inched forward just far enough to touch it. The bear fell, lifeless, to the floor, still in its frightening pose. _

_Breathing hard, Ned backed away, until he too had exited the library's emergency door. That was the last time he saw Antoinette Athaneum, and the last time he would ever touch a girl._

So, he had exaggerated a bit in telling Chuck about his relationships with girls. He'd never really had one, and certainly not an "intimate" one. This kind of counted. But intimate was not supposed to mean traumatic.

He supposed he had touched a few girls, who were also naked, while bringing them back to life, but they were not naked by their own decision and were usually covered by tarps anyway. And that didn't count, either. He didn't want Chuck to think that anything had ever gone on with any other girl, but he didn't want her to think he was an idiot around girls. He didn't want her to think he was an idiot at all.

Sighing, he realized how much he missed having her sleep next to him. They'd had an unofficial routine. They would climb into their respective bed, and Chuck would start some kind of conversation, just babbling on about nothing until she fell asleep, and Ned would listen silently. Now he was the one talking, but not out loud, and no one was there to listen. The longer he was without her, the more unsure he became of their relationship. She'd said that he was her boyfriend. But he was so insecure, and their relationship was so delicate, that the slightest thing could shatter it all like a smashed plastic monkey that wasn't really plastic.

Smashing the monkeys had brought good things. But he knew that smashing his relationship with Chuck would not.

In such a brief amount of time, she had gone from a good but distant memory to a real and necessary part of his life. He had never forgotten about her, but the last time he had seen her was twenty years ago, and he never really expected her to show up in his life again. But he was rather cynical. Had she thought about him?

He banished Antoinette from his thoughts. It had been so long ago. He groaned. Now he was thinking about her anyway, even when he had been trying not to. Did he really have to mention her to everyone? Oh, how embarrassing… He needed to see Chuck.

**.**

It was very late, but the Pie Maker didn't care. He used his special key to enter the apartment, being careful not to make any noise. A scrapbook was out on the coffee table, and some papers were strewn around it; he glanced at it briefly before making his way across the floor to the bedroom. The apartment wasn't as clean as his own, but he noticed Chuck had made an effort to tidy up – possibly in anticipation of him? – and he smiled in gratitude. He watched her sleep for a moment, her beautiful lips curved into a smile against her father's old pillow. Everything about her was beautiful. He allowed himself to give her a cursory glance before edging back out of the room. He just wanted to make sure she was here, safe, real.

Then she stirred. For the second time that day, he had startled her, and he was immediately guilt-ridden. "Chuck, I'm sorry," he apologized, again. "I was just…"

"Watching me sleep?" Chuck supplied knowingly. "You know, I've had bad experiences with people attacking me in the dark."

Ned shuddered. "You have no idea."

Though it was too dark for him to see it, Chuck raised her eyebrow. "Is there something we need to talk about?"

He gave in immediately.

"When I was almost out of school, there was this girl at the library, and she tried to… well… you _know_… only, it… this… bearskin rug… alive…" He shuddered again, not making any sense. Chuck only laughed.

"It's okay," she said. "I understand."

Ned slumped over, relieved. She understood everything about him, without even needing to hear him speak.

"Are there any more scandalous secrets you feel the need to share right now?"

"Well, there are more," he teased, "but it's getting late, and…"

"I've got one," Chuck said. She cupped her hands secretively around her mouth. "I have a crush on you."

He grinned. "That doesn't count. I already knew that."

"I miss talking to you at night. I miss seeing you and knowing you're there. I miss being in the blackness, and then seeing your smile."

She smiled. So did he.

"There's something I want to show you," she said, pushing the heavy covers away from herself and stumbling around in the blackness for a moment. Ned instinctively leaned forward before pressing himself back against the wall.

"I'm fine," she assured him, going out to the living room. "Come on."

He followed her, settling next to her, but not too closely, on the raggedy old couch. Colorful strips of paper littered the coffee table and she swept them to the floor with the back of her hand as she opened the scrapbook.

"I know you're angry at yourself for what you've kept from me," Chuck said. "So here are all the other secrets I've kept from you."

"I can't see them," Ned protested. "It's too dark."

"I know that," Chuck said, closing the scrapbook again and smiling slightly. "But they're still here."

"Why did you have to move out?"

She paused before answering, not really anticipating that question. "Because."

"That's not really an answer," he mumbled, almost pouting.

"Ned, I'm not mad at you anymore, if that's what you're worried about," she said, almost too softly to be audible. "I haven't been mad for a long time." She paused, picking at one of her fingernails. "If there was a time I hated you, I hated myself just as much because of it."

He stiffened. "I know you don't hate me."

"Good."

"It just feels like you're trying to escape from me. Like I really screwed up. I did really screw up. I hate secrets. I hate keeping them from you. So I'm done keeping secrets."

"I don't have any really interesting secrets," Chuck decided. "Maybe I'm just not an interesting person."

"I think anyone who's already died is pretty interesting," Ned countered, chuckling.

"Why did you keep me alive?"

"W-what?"

"You know, after the minute. Why am I still here?"

"Because I never stopped thinking about you. My whole life. I don't really know why. You just reminded me of home, and of everything that I loved and missed and wanted back. And when I found you again, it felt like a part of me was coming alive again along with you."

"That's the most beautiful thing anyone's ever said to me," Chuck said, blinking rapidly, trying to contain the emotion that was spilling from her eyes. "I love you, Ned. With all my soul. I just wish I could give you more."

"You've given me everything," Ned replied, breathless. "God, Chuck. I love you so much, it hurts," he whispered, fiercely, hoarsely. "_I_ would die if I touched you. I'd kill myself just to be with you again." He was trembling now, so overcome with raw emotion, so angry with himself as he remembered losing her again, and felt the danger of keeping secrets. He wanted to grab her and kiss her hard. But she turned her back on him and walked away.

"Where are you going?" he asked harshly, gritting his teeth against the tide of feelings overtaking him.

Thin plastic snapped against his face in response, and he threw himself into it, into her, letting all of himself that wasn't her drift away into some far away place. He turned away briefly to inhale some cold air, then returned. His heart was pounding, his entire self focused on concentrating all of his love, all of his being, into this one sad imitation of a kiss. He was sweating now, and the noise in his head was like a million bees swarming. He saw fires in the night, bright daisies dancing, giant wheels of cheese tumbling down hills. And then it was over. They lay back, exhausted at the tumultuous passion that was coursing through them, breathing hard.

"I've never been so happy in my entire life," the Pie Maker breathed, slipping a soft glove onto one of his hands and stroking her cheek. And the girl he loved closed her eyes, thinking of all the things they had yet to discover together, and how her life was just exactly like a fairy tale.


End file.
